From visible to invisible

Spenser's "Aprill" and messianic ethics

pp. 47-65

in: James A. Knapp, Image ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Spenser's first appearance in print came in a publication that exemplifies the early modern struggle over the use of visual images discussed in the previous chapter. Jan van der Noot's Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569) is concerned explicitly with the dangers of visual experience at the same time that it draws on the aesthetic power of its many visual illustrations.¹ Iconoclastic to its core, the book is also a primer for those seeking to navigate the difficult Reformation condition of embodied experience. Like Foxes "Book of Martyrs," the book's heavy emphasis on visual illustration is counterbalanced by a thematic denigration of the value of visual experience.² Van der Noot shared with other early Reformers the sense that visual illustration offered a potential means of spreading the word-centered Protestant message. As a key part of the message was that too much attention to the material world leads to spiritual failure, his book relied on a mode of illustration in which the medium of expression deployed was simultaneously the object of critique. At the heart of the book, and making up the "theater" of the title, are Spenser's translations of epigrams and sonnets by Petrarch and Joachim du Bellay indicting the vanity of the world, followed by van der Noot's own sonnets depicting scenes from the Book of Revelation. ³ The illustrated poems are followed by a long, antipapal prose commentary by van der Noot drawn from John Bale and Heinrich Bullinger.